[Serious] Literal and Not Literal

[Belacqua]

That is the breakdown of the world economic order which enabled the efficient utilization of skill, resource and competitive advantage through international trade and multilateral security which had been in force for 70 years, and which had just a few years ago been complacently envisioned to last into a star trek future.  

Ah, well. 

It's the (former) status quo economic situation of the last 70 years which got us into the present mess. 

The Star Trek future was an impossible fantasy held out as a carrot for the gullible. I never understood what good it would do to fly off to distant stars, when everywhere you go is just like a different neighborhood in LA. Genuine difference and strangeness is found on earth, and is far from exhausted. 

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Here's an alternate fantasy about the ideal future, that's about as serious as Star Trek, but less technological and more humanist. It doesn't require that we join a quasi-militarist organization, put on uniforms, and obey a benign captain. Nor does it imply that a fierce instinct for survival is all that we are capable of.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archi.../soul-man/

A focus on what's valuable in life that wasn't purely economic could have different values.